Flight (24 page)

Bryan smiled at her. “Excellent point, Carol,” he said.

By then the deck was nearly finished. From the sliding glass door, Carol surveyed its vast expanse. Will was on his hands and knees, nailing down planks. Boards were jutting up at intervals. Staring at them, Carol realized they were the frames for built-in furniture. There was a long base for a bench, four legs for a table, tall posts to support a grape arbor. Their skeletal forms were silhouetted against the dull landscape’s fading light.

One night after putting the girls to bed, Carol sat down at her typewriter and began.

Some utopias are big and others are small. My husband Will’s is the size of a large backyard deck. He built it from the ground up, from plans he drew himself.

When Will purchased the farm, he did it without her. He drove up to visit his parents. His brother, George, had called him and told him the farm next door was for sale, but Will never mentioned that. He said he was taking Margaret for a weekend with his folks. Leanne was a baby, so Carol didn’t mind. Her mother came to visit from Dayton, and they worked on little projects, a new slipcover for the couch, bright new curtains for the kitchen. Carol had friends over for coffee, took her mother to the tennis club to show her where their league played.

When Will came back, Margaret tumbled from the car and raced to the house.

“Dad bought us a barn!” she shrieked. Carol’s mother laughed, because she thought Margaret was being cute. But Carol had seen
Will’s face. He looked half guilty, half triumphant, the expression of a man who had just changed the course of their lives.

Like most utopias, Carol wrote in her essay, my husband’s is an entirely personal one. It is based on the particular dreams and beliefs of one individual. Because of that, it cannot help but fail to create a better world.

Eventually, something had to happen. In their second-to-last class, Bryan seemed slightly distracted, not his usual jocular self. When the students left, he didn’t stand near the door chatting, as usual. Carol stayed seated at her desk, unsure of what to do. A few moments of silence passed before he looked up.

“I’ll drive” was all he said.

They went out to the parking lot together. In the new spring sun, he seemed to loosen up. He looked at Carol with warm eyes. When he unlocked the passenger door and held it open for her, the sun shone through his shirt, showing the dark form of his body within. Carol could see the silhouette of his upper arm through the blue fabric, and she shuddered with what she thought must be desire. Quickly, she looked away.

She had never made love to anyone but Will. Her high school boyfriend used to try to talk her into it, but it was the early sixties: having sex was not something good girls did. Even his asking for it wasn’t entirely in earnest. It was the accepted game: he asked and she said no. Neither of them would have wanted it any other way.

But in the seventies, sex was everywhere. Carol was shocked by the wispy girls she saw strolling around town, their sandals and bra-lessness and torn jeans all proclaiming their availability. She was a young woman, too, and this was supposed to be the sexual revolution, but she had gotten married and it had passed her by.

It wasn’t that she didn’t have a good sex life. Will was passionate and eager, which had put her off at first. But eventually, she grew used to his energy, and he learned that a little gentleness would go a long way with her.

How would it be to make love to Bryan? She imagined he knew things she didn’t. He was thinner than Will, only a few years younger, perhaps, but a completely different type. His hands on the steering wheel were brushed with a fringe of dark hair. She didn’t know if she liked that or not.

When they got near town, Bryan didn’t take the usual route to the falafel place, turning down a residential street instead. The car stopped in front of a large pink Victorian house.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“These are my digs,” he said, putting his hand on the door. “I thought I’d make you lunch for a change.”

She followed him inside. The house was spacious and barely furnished. In the front room, a sofa slouched behind a cluttered makeshift table. Hundreds of records lined the floor along one side of the room. She saw a poster for Godard’s
Weekend.

“We saw that in my European-film class!” she said, happy to recognize something, even though she had found the film confusing and strange. Bryan led the way into a large kitchen at the back. There, too, clutter ruled. The counters were lined with tea, coffee, nuts, a row of jars containing oils, honey, vinegars. Every surface was coated with crumbs. A small flame of understanding flickered to life in Carol’s head.

“Do you live here alone?” she asked.

Bryan turned to her. “No, there are seven of us: four in bedrooms on the second floor and a trio who share the attic. We’re a cooperative household.”

“Like a commune?”

He smiled. “Yeah, sort of like a commune.”

“Oh.” Carol didn’t know what to say. She looked around again.
A utopia,
she thought. Bryan’s utopia. “Where did you all meet?” she asked.

“Most of them are graduate students at Western,” he told her.

“We all met there. When I finished my degree, I stayed on.”

Carol was oddly disappointed. She hadn’t thought of Bryan as a Western Michigan grad. She had thought he must come from some
other, more exotic place. Princeton, maybe. Or the University of Chicago.

“Our house is vegetarian,” Bryan said. “So I have some nice veggie soup for us.” He was scooping soup out of a Crock-Pot.

“Oh, that’s fine,” Carol said quickly. “It’s quite interesting, really. Vegetarianism, I mean.”

“Yes, well, it’s a house rule.” Bryan turned toward her with a bowl in each hand. “Of course, I cheat sometimes when I’m not here. I can’t resist a nice piece of ham.”

“Of course.” She couldn’t stop being flustered.

“And rules are made to be broken, aren’t they?” Bryan smiled at her, and for the first time, Carol thought,
I really don’t know this man at all.

“Have a seat,” he said, pulling out a chair at a large country-style table. “I’ll just grab us some bread.”

The bread was dark and grainy, the soup thick and warming. Carol began to feel better as they ate. Bryan finished quickly and then sat back in his chair, regarding her steadily as she sipped soup. She shifted uncomfortably. The desire she had felt in the car had vanished; in its place, she felt an oddly fervent longing for her family. What were the girls doing just then?

Bryan stood up and retrieved a packet of cigarettes from the sidebar. “Smoke?” he asked her.

Carol shook her head. She looked up at Bryan and made the mistake of meeting his eyes.

He walked behind her chair and rested a hand on her shoulder, kneading gently. “Let’s go upstairs,” he said.

Carol didn’t know what to say. How did one turn down such an invitation? She didn’t want to insult him. But she didn’t want to go upstairs. “I think I have to be getting home,” she said miserably.

There was a pause. “You think you do?” he asked.

“I do.”

“I see.” Bryan didn’t move his hand right away, but it stopped kneading and became a thing, a deadweight on her shoulder. He stood there for what seemed like minutes, as if waiting for her to say more.

“Maybe you could take me back to my car now,” she said, her voice almost a whisper. It worked; it broke the spell.

Bryan took his hand back and moved away. “Yes, okay,” he said. There was a new brusque tone in his voice. “Let’s get you back to your vehicle.”

Carol drove away on autopilot, following an instinct that led her home. She expected Will and the girls to be outside, but as soon as she opened the front door, the girls launched themselves at her, propelled by pure need.

“Mommy!” Leanne cried, in one of her rare moments of protest. “I want to be a dog and not a cat. Margaret always is the dog.”

“Oh, sweetie.” Carol picked her up. Will was on his back on the floor, asleep.

“Mom,” Margaret said, “does a carrot know when it gets picked?”

Carol stood at the threshold, looking at Will. He took up over six feet of carpet. There were small toys on his stomach, as if the girls had been using him as a table.

This is only temporary,
Carol thought.
He’ll get his job back soon.
He has to. It’s what he does best.

Margaret made a small sigh, a
humph
of displeasure. She hated being ignored. “A carrot doesn’t have a brain; it can’t think,” Carol told her. For an instant, she wished she were back at the house with Bryan, his hand resting on her shoulder. But that made no sense: when she’d been there, she only wanted to be home.

“I want to be a dog!” Leanne yelled, even though Margaret seemed to have forgotten the game.

With a jerk, Will started awake. He took a deep breath and looked around, lost. “You’re home,” he said. “I was just having a little nap while the girls played.” His voice trailed off, and his head dropped back down onto the carpet.

“Come on,” Carol said to the girls. “You want to help Mommy start dinner?”

Will’s head popped up again, and now he seemed awake. “No, let’s go out for dinner!” he said. “Let’s get spaghetti and celebrate! I finished the deck!”

That weekend, spring arrived. The sun turned from white to golden, and the trees unclenched into buds. The girls wanted to play on the new deck, and Carol let them. They ran up and down it, clomping as hard as they could, so that Carol could hear them from inside, where she was finishing her paper.
Thud thud thud thud thud thud thud.
Then a pause as they turned around, giggling. Then all the way back the other way.

Carol wrote about her husband. She wrote about his desire to build something most people realized was impossible. She wrote about how a man who moved forward for a living tried to find his own bliss in going back. When she was done, she reread her paper. It was a beautiful essay, she thought with surprise. She didn’t know if it was what Bryan had in mind, but the satisfaction of having written it filled her body like a warm drink.

What she didn’t write about was herself. She didn’t write about how, two weeks before they moved to Michigan, she had called an attorney to ask about divorce. She didn’t write about the ugliness of the man’s voice, or the awful things he had said. How uncertain he told her the future would be. She didn’t write about how she had decided to forget the phone call, how she had packed up their household with care. How she had unpacked here and tried to see beauty in Will’s farm. How, when she watched the girls run giddy circles in the field or sat down to read them a story, always saying one word wrong to give Margaret a chance to correct her, she was filled with the feeling that it could be her utopia, too.

The last day of class was a gray Tuesday. Will drove her so he could use the car. They dropped the girls off first.

“I can’t be late,” Carol said. In European film, they had an exam.
Bryan didn’t believe in exams. They were going to turn in their final papers and write self evaluations.

“I’ll get you there,” Will said. He sped up, glancing at her, and for an instant, Carol could see that for all his complaining, he was secretly proud of her.

They pulled into the Plaingrove parking lot with five minutes to spare. Carol had watched the school as they neared it. It was low and dull, not welcoming at all.

“Okay, then,” Will said. “Give ’em hell.”

“Yeah.” Carol hesitated. She thought about giving her paper to Bryan, Bryan reading those things about her husband in his grubby living room. Maybe he would read amusing bits out loud to his commune buddies. Maybe they would all laugh.
Bored housewife,
they would say.
Frigid, too,
Bryan might add.

She climbed out of the car. Will pulled away, and she watched the Riviera gliding off, smooth as a shark in water. She turned to look at the college. She had five minutes before the start of her film exam. It would cover everything they watched: a long, dim Czech film. A Spanish film with no plot. An Italian film about a wife going mad. “This is a beautiful film,” the professor had said, but to Carol it looked industrial and depressing. She and Will had seen
Doctor Zhivago
together. That was a beautiful film.

TWA had been the first airline to show films on board. Now all of them did it. It was only the beginning. Will had said. The airlines were on the way back up. People were going to travel more and more. The layoffs were only temporary.

For days Carol had been trying to think of what to write in her self-evaluation for Bryan.
The past is illusion,
she could say,
and the future, too.
So anything I have done in this class is an illusion.
What matters is that right here, right now, I deserve an A.
The sad thing was, Bryan would give her an A for that.

Something caught her eye. It was the Riviera. Instead of leaving, Will had circled the parking lot and was coming back toward her.

She turned to face the car as it passed her and kept on going. She could see Will grinning behind the wheel.

He circled the lot three times, driving too fast. Each time he drove by, he raised his eyebrows at her, as if his not stopping surprised him, too. She was laughing by the time he stopped in front of her. The passenger window glided down, and Will leaned toward it.

“Don’t you want to go?” he asked. Carol shook her head. She imagined folding her paper into smaller and smaller squares, until it was tiny enough to swallow.

“I don’t want to go,” she told her husband.

“Well, get in, then,” he said. If there was one thing Will understood, it was this. He opened her door. She looked back. Then she stepped forward, ducked her head, and got in.

“
TELL ME AGAIN WHERE YOU ARE NOW.
”

“I’m at home. My parents’ home. It’s my sister’s wedding.”

“And you have your son with you?”